1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for authenticating electronic data, and specifically to the searchability of digitally notarized electronic documents.
2. Description of Related Art
Traditionally, a paper document is validated through a notarization process, in which a Notary Public embosses a notary stamp (notary seal) on the document and signs and dates the notary seal on the document. However, with the advent of the digital age, many documents are being moved to digital form without retaining a paper copy of the document. Therefore, in order to validate the electronic document, a print-out of the document must be obtained in a format appropriate for the document. However, computer forensics has highlighted the differences between native electronic files and their paper or TIFF renditions. Such differences include certain document properties (often referred to as metadata), comments appended to business documents (e.g., notes to word processing files and PowerPoint presentations) and formulae and hidden columns in spreadsheets.
Therefore, over the past decade, a new digital notarization process has emerged to provide digital time stamping and notarization of electronic documents over the Internet. The Digital Notary® Service provided by Surety, Inc. allows users to notarize, timestamp and validate digital data of any type using client software provided to the user. Surety's Digital Notary® Service accomplishes digital notarization through a one-way hashing function that produces a digital fingerprint of the document. The digital fingerprint is transmitted over the Internet to Surety's Notary Server for notarization. After the fingerprint is notarized, the Notary Server returns a Notary Record (i.e., a small data record) to the user that contains the equivalent of a Notary Public's seal, date and signature on a paper document.
Although Surety's Digital Notary® Service provides the ability to validate digital documents, the Digital Notary® Service does not provide any medium for searching or otherwise organizing notarized digital documents. Most applications are automatically linked to some type of searching functionality. However, if there are multiple documents created using multiple applications, it can be inefficient and costly to pull up each application separately for each document to search through the documents.
In addition, some documents, such as TIFF images, must be converted to a searchable format prior to beginning the search process. The typical OCR drivers used to convert TIFF images to searchable text not only change the format of the original file, but also provide an unacceptable level of accuracy in terms of creating the searchable text component. For example, twenty thousand pages scanned at a 97 percent accuracy level will contain approximately 1.2 million errors, and it is nearly impossible to achieve a 97 percent accuracy level with non-e-mail types of business documents (e.g., spreadsheets). In these cases, the searchable text version of the TIFF image cannot be considered a valid copy of the document. Therefore, there is a need for a process that securely converts files of any format into accurate, searchable, readable and printable files capable of being digitally notarized and validated.